Chinese scientists create plant gene-editing tool ‘even school students and old farmers can master’
- While conventional methods of heritable gene editing in plants can take up to a year, innovation could reduce the process to about two weeks, say authors
- ‘Cut-dip-budding’ method skips some of the traditionally tedious steps of process, including tissue culture
“Even primary school students and old farmers can master gene editing,” says scientist Zhu Jian-Kang, who has helped develop a new approach that could greatly simplify the difficult and time-consuming process of editing genes in plants.
Zhu, a scientist at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, was among researchers from southern China who helped develop the innovation.
Although gene editing is dependent on expertise, in his comment Zhu was pointing towards the technological leap his team had made in making the process far easier and more accessible.
Cao Xuesong, a scientist at SUSTech and a member of Zhu’s team described the current obstacles to gene editing: “Genetic modification or editing of plants has a very high technological barrier because it involves a lot of very specialised, precise operations and is inefficient – and currently only a very small fraction of plants are amenable to be genetically edited”.
07:58
Why is the Chinese government so concerned about food security?
In a study published in the peer-reviewed journal The Innovation Life in December, Zhu, who is also editor-in-chief of the journal, and his colleagues reported an “extremely simplified method for genetic transformation and gene editing” that they said they hoped would significantly lower the threshold for gene editing and increase its efficiency.